Wikipedia celebrates its twentieth anniversary on Friday and the collaborative, volunteer-produced web encyclopedia goals to spend the subsequent 20 years additional increasing free entry to data.
Based on January 15, 2001, by the American-British entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia is now the seventh-most standard web site on this planet, with its greater than 55 million articles being consulted 15 billion occasions each month.
The web site began in English however inside two months had already launched in German and Swedish. It’s now out there in 309 languages.
However Wales does not intend to cease there, with the languages of the growing world within the web site’s sights.
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“That’s really important that the next billion people, two billion people who come online are going to want to participate in Wikipedia, to grow their own storehouse of knowledge, and they’re going to rely on us to support that work, and that’s a big part of how I think about the future,” Wales informed AFP in an interview.
In 2006, Wales set the objective of getting 100,000 entries in Wikipedia for each language with multiple million audio system, however he recognised that Wikipedia continues to be not less than 20 years from attaining that.
Non-profit standing
Wikipedia’s non-profit standing nature make it an outlier amongst at this time’s web dominated by the likes of Google and Fb and hark again to the online’s early idealistic days when the open-source motion harnessed the skills of volunteers to supply free entry to instruments and information.
Wales stated he was impressed by such collaborative efforts.
“I’d seen the growth of open-source software, free software, and to me, it seemed obvious that you could use the same kind of techniques to build a free encyclopedia, so I was in a real kind of panic because I thought this is such an obvious idea that other people will do it,” he stated.
“But we actually were probably two years into the project before anybody noticed or cared, so maybe it didn’t have to be so urgent.”
Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia, the thirteenth hottest web site on this planet (55B visits a month).
He is in all probability essentially the most profitable web entrepreneur that is not a billionaire.
When The Guardian requested Wales if he cared about NOT being a billionaire, this was his reply: pic.twitter.com/cjLFLCUC8u
— 𝚃𝚛𝚞𝚗𝚐 𝙿𝚑𝚊𝚗 📠 (@TrungTPhan) January 14, 2021
Wikipedia continues to be a volunteer-driven effort, with every language website constructed up independently from authentic contributions slightly than translated articles.
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In contrast to conventional encyclopedias, contributions by non-experts are welcome, which has pushed innumerable debates concerning the content material and have led to restrictions on updating sure entries.
The web site has additionally are available in for criticism attributable to the truth that its volunteers are overwhelmingly white males from Western nations, with critics saying it lacks details about ladies and growing nations.